Building a successful SaaS software company

This is one of the most discussed and widely analyzed topics in the modern business field. As SaaS model continues to advance and attracts more and more potential tech designers and businessmen by reduced costs and a relatively short implementation period, it has become a dream for most of the software developers to build a big company in such a promising field. Techcrunch editors are also doing some research and have so far come up with a database of 66 outstanding SaaS companies with more than 1 billion dollars value.

Most of these companies were established after 1997 and before 2008. Interestingly, there are several companies founded in 2008 or right after the financial crash, which demonstrates that, with a strong team of professionals and a brilliant idea, market conditions do not matter at all. By the way, it is worth mentioning that most of the SaaS companies were started by teams of 2-7 developers who turn out to be strangers before. And only around 32 percent of the analyzed companies were solo-founded. Moreover, these were first business and management experiences for relatively young entrepreneurs in their thirties who now became CEOs of the incipient businesses. Here comes the question: how did they choose the leader, the CEO? What are the key factors or personal qualities making this person noticeable from the team?

Unfortunately, very few of the analyzed SaaS companies originate from Europe or are considered to be international. Most of them are US-based, with 41 percent of American companies born in the Silicon Valley. Does it mean that all the potential for new business success lives on one continent?

Now one of the most popular questions in any startup area: the field of the product promotion and further development. For the analyzed set of companies working with SaaS delivery model, only 18 percent are working in one specified field like healthcare or real estate, others target various industries.

Still, a lot of questions concerning the growing process of a SaaS company remain unanswered and require some further research. For example, it is not clear how soon a newly established company can grow mature enough to join the stock markets and become public, which, therefore, promises more funds to build the company on further. Also, it is important to know the initial selling strategy allowing to collect a huge capital. Anyway, for now it is even more vital proving that the SaaS business model itself is a recipe for success and if so, how to make it work out among European startup communities.